Trends Matter: A reflection on our trends process

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New York – As a Director of Innovation here at Syneos HealthTM, I’ve been at the forefront of our trends endeavor and journey. I call it both an endeavor and a journey for a few reasons:

With our extensive network of talented individuals within the communications, selling, and clinical spaces, we have a wealth of knowledge at our disposal. This fact makes us very unlike other organizations because of our ties to the front lines of healthcare. BUT, this also means we have a vast number of people that we need to connect with across the globe. Our team worked with more than 200 of our Syneos Health partners from Los Angeles to Munich to Osaka to identify changes in behavior, technology and the landscape.

By collaborating with our trend spotters from all facets of the healthcare industry, our trends represent the pulse of what’s happening in the sector. While we have created the Trends Report for the past eight years, this year, we took a new approach. Given the breadth we have within the healthcare space, our 2019 trends focus on our philosophy of “shortening the distance from lab to life”. This year, we created the 2019 Health Trend Ten, 10 trends with four themes each to provide decision-driving insights and help us co-create new solutions.

Now, in addition to facilitating some of the trendspotting workshops and contributing content, I had the task of designing and creative directing this year’s trends book. Again, we aimed for something different from last year, one that really owned our Syneos Health brand narrative. Within this book we have 94 illustrations and charts, alongside 10 unique posters, to help bring these trends to life. Needless to say, this project was a labor of love and an immense task.

The design of each poster aims to conceptually visualize our trends. In the image above, you are seeing a sneak peek behind the process and creative development of one of our posters: To help focus on our trend of “Accelerating Evidence” the poster seeks to visualize the fact that new policies are coming to life around the world based on understanding new experiences, impacts, and expectations, on a geographical level. Leaders in the space must look at how life exists and is rapidly evolving globally and regionally. Using that bird’s eye view, understanding daily life and finding insights and evidence at immense speed has never been more important. Each poster visual focuses on a metaphor, theme or adjacency tied to the trend.

When you have a chance to look through the book, you’ll see that for “Relieving Burden,” the visual highlights a stormy sea of paperwork with a single boat navigating through the landscape. We also used a cutout paper style to further push that theme. “Radical Re-Orgs” visualizes a new unknown, the final frontier, a landscape that we can see through our telescope lens, but have yet to fully understand and explore.

We hope that this initiative will inspire and motivate you to consider the possibilities within the healthcare space and beyond. Our team put our hearts into this project because we believe it will help our clients, partners, and the industry to find new ways to make life-changing impacts. The result is a comprehensive book that our team and I hope you will love and appreciate just as much as we do.

About the Author:

A creative director by trade, Cheena has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands, startups and agencies. Specializing in using design thinking, technology and strategy to build out creative solutions, she adds her expertise to the Syneos Health Communications team as Director of Innovation. During her career, she has been at the cutting edge of the industry with experience in augmented reality, social listening, media theory and user experience. With over 13 years of experience, much of her focus has revolved around solving communication challenges and creating brand engagement in a culturally relevant way. She also has been an instructor at Miami Ad School NY for over 6 years, mentoring new creatives on developing integrated campaigns, understanding media, interactive concepting, and working with account planning teams.